Friday, April 16, 2010

Cameron can't do maths and Brown doesn't know his own policies!

Last night in the debate there were a couple of gaffes, although most happened so fast spotting them was tough. Cameron, for example, said that he met a 40-year old black bloke who apparently said, "I came here when I was six, I’ve served in the Royal Navy for 30 years, I’m incredibly proud of my country".

This would obviously make the guy 10 when he took the Queens Shilling, clearly a mathematics failure. Not sure either why Cameron felt the need to mention his colour, other than it was on the question of immigration and he perhaps felt the need to stress that people who are not white are bothered about it too.

On the latter point, it's painstakingly obvious that being bothered by immigration is not an exclusively white thing. This is also true of racism as there's plenty of evidence of African vs Caribbean racism in some parts of London, although don't expect to see the "right on" types who love identity politics to acknowledge it too often.

Anyway, I digress, the left wing blog, Political Scrapbook reckons Cameron's cock-up is evidence that he just makes stuff up. The saner, less partisan, amongst you would be more inclined to put it down to a debating cock-up because of the speed with which things were happening and a mistake about how old the guy really was.

This is bit like Brown's glaring cock-up when he said that Labour was going to allow us all to take out injunctions against the Police - something which, if it were the case, would please a lot of criminals and drug dealers. Of course, what he actually meant was the promise to have the right to take out injunctions against repeat offenders of anti-social behaviour and have the Police pay the legal costs.

The fact is, in the environment that these three guys are debating in, they're inevitably going to make slips of the tongue. If they're quick, like Clegg was last night, they can correct themselves and you know it was slip. Saying this though, it's an election campaign, so the slip-ups they make will be taken literally by opponents for mischief.

So, back to the title of this post. Cameron probably can do maths, and Brown probably does know his own policies - but under the bright lights it all goes to pot (without an injunction from the dealer ;-) )